Spirochetes

" 'What happens is that the spirochetes, if they aren't treated right away, change form, so that the treatment can never catch up with the disease.  Each time the doctor tries something new, the form is different.  The disease goes deeper and deeper into your system.  This man has it in his spinal cord, and it's gone into his brain, he has neurological symptoms.  Now he's going to doctors who have it themselves, to see how they're treating their own diseases.'

I stare down at my arm, mesmerized with horror. 

As she talks, against my will, I am picturing the spirochetes in my own body, spiraling deeper and deeper into my defenseless system, burrowing their way into my spinal fluid, sliding unstoppably into the crevices of my brain.  Each word she speaks makes this real, inevitable, incontrovertible.

All my feelings of triumph, of power and victory, are sliding downward, cascading toward ruin. She is destroying everything I have accomplished."

---Roxana Robinson,  "The Treatment" in A Perfect Stranger (2005)

In this very tight short story, Roxana Robinson captures the struggle of a middle-aged woman who is most likely afflicted with late-stage Lyme disease.  Robinson has tone-perfect dialogue and some very memorable descriptive passages, in particular one that focuses on the apparatus through which the protagonist adminsters her intravenous antibiotic, Rocephin.  What is most remarkable, however, is this story's accurate rendering of the mental enervation of chronic illness, and the divisive and humliating boundary between those who enjoy good health and those who struggle with disease.  In this passage, a patient who has managed to convince herself that she is recovering from her infection has her healing vision dismantled by a nurse (memorably described as "powerful and clumsy, like a shaggy little bull")  who reveals the devastating reality of her disease.   Robinson's account of the "other[ness]" of disease  is a crucial text for anyone who must treat patients with serious illnesses--Lyme disease or otherwise.

Decomposition, Or, "Maggots Already"

This blog showcases composition and seeks to foster creative activity through the reading, collecting,  exhibiting, and curating of "pollen"  as food for thought and the inspiration for future productions.  It is therefore quite odd to be offering a quote that showcases decomposition and yet may still inspire the same sort of reflections.   

Today's quote is taken from Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild (which was also made into a film released in the fall of 2007) which documents the life and untimely death of the young Christopher McCandless, who ventured into the Alaskan wilderness in the early summer of 1992 and died three months later.    Krakauer's book offers deeper insights than the film into Chris's own writings.  In this scene, Chris describes his futile efforts to preserve a moose that he has killed. The appearance of the maggots indicates his failure and he second-guesses his slaughtering of the moose. In these diary entries he appears as earnest yet youthfully idealistic.  The maggots appear as a naturalist convention in this work, underscoring the harshness and struggle that survival in the wilderness entails--and, perhaps, the inevitability of our own decomposition.    The selection begins with Krakauer's words and moves into the diary entries:

"Alaskan hunters know that the easiest way to preserve meat in the bush is to slice it into thin strips and then air-dry it on a makeshift rack.  But McCandless, in his naivete, relied on the advice of hunters he'd consulted in South Dakota, who advised him to smoke his meat, not an easy task under the circumstances.  'Butchering extremely difficult,' he worte in the journal on June 10.  'Fly and mosquito hordes.  Remove intestines, liver, kidneys, one lung, steaks.  Get hindquarters and leg to stream.' 

June 11: 'Remove heart and other lung. Two front legs and head.  Get rest to stream.  Haul near cave.  Try to protect with smoker.'

June 12: 'Remove half rib-cage and steaks.  Can only work nights.  Keep smokers going.'

June 13: 'Get remainder of rib-cage, shoulder and neck to cave.  Start smoking.'

June 14:  'Maggots already! Smoking appears ineffective.  Don't know, looks like disaster.  I now wish I had never shot the moose.  One of the greatest tragedies of my life.'    "

---Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild (1996)